What materials are truly sustainable? That’s a question we here at Business of Home have been puzzling out in our sustainability coverage. It’s also one closely examined by Gensler, a global architecture, design and urban planning firm. With offices in 57 locations and more than 6,000 employees, the company couldn’t afford to be vague about the definition of “sustainable,” so an internal team embarked on an ambitious project: to create clearly defined benchmarks. The firm first announced its Gensler Product Sustainability (GPS) Standards in 2023 and rolled out the company-wide use of these guidelines across 12 product categories this past January.(Gensler itself doesn’t do purchasing, but it no longer specifies materials that don’t meet its minimum standard.) Now the company has expanded its list with eight new categories.

Glancing at Gensler’s original list of sustainable products, interior designers might have been disappointed to see that it was mostly made up of unseen materials—things like insulation and gypsum board. However, this focus on the foundational elements was strategic. “The goal is to have the highest impact possible. If you think about the materials used in an interior job, you’ve got a lot of carpet, ceiling tile and drywall,” says Katie Mesia, co-director of firm-wide design resilience at Gensler, a role focused on shifting the company’s practices in order to meet its carbon neutrality goals.

With the expansion, the list now includes materials and products that are more familiar to residential designers’ day-to-day practice: textiles, tile, wallcoverings, solid surfaces, hollow metal doors and frames, insulated wall cladding, access flooring, and broadloom carpet. The GPS Standards are presented as a list of technical requirements for designers to compare to the information manufacturers provide them, rather than a catalog of specific products or brands that meet the criteria. Full disclosure: They are very technical and will be impractical for most designers to use to assess every single thing they specify—but the bigger goal behind the initiative is to move the needle for manufacturers, who now have to meet specific benchmarks in order to work with a certain behemoth design firm that operates in 100 countries.

Creating a baseline for what counts as “sustainable” involves some complicated trade-offs. The team at Gensler didn’t want to create requirements that no one could meet, so they talked with vendors to find out what was real-world doable in all markets (not an ideal that would be impossible to meet in many places). “When we started trying to figure out how we would best establish a standard, they consistently told us that they were confused by the amount of options and third-party criteria out there,” says David Briefel, a sustainability director at Gensler. GPS guidelines are meant to be achievable everywhere Gensler works (which is just about everywhere). However, that didn’t mean the company left the ideal unquantified: In addition to the baseline standards, it created the more ambitious “market differentiator” recommendations. These higher benchmarks are also meant to be a goalpost for manufacturers to aim for.

Gensler made GPS public, because it hopes to standardize how the industry talks about sustainability. “We’re looking to establish a consistent language for this criteria, so that it can be scaled,” says Briefel. “If Gensler is asking for materials in the same language as another firm, and we’re all using the same data language, then technology partners, who provide databases for selection of these types of materials, can also use that language. And when manufacturers are being asked for this information, they are only being asked in one format, not 20 different formats.” (Gensler is also working with Mindful Materials on this larger project of streamlining how architects and interior designers talk about sustainability.)

“We welcome anyone to use this criteria,” says Mesia. “We have the luxury to do research that some other firms do not. Our hope is that the real impact is not project by project, but industry-wide momentum.” Once Gensler has set a standard, its internal staff that manages materials libraries checks to make sure that the samples in each local office meet the guidelines. But how might other firms proceed? They can use the GPS Standards to check their own materials library. “If you’re aspiring to design to the highest sustainability standards, you should really be looking at those market differentiators,” she says. Then, if you find a specific data point where you need to compromise, fall back to the baseline standards, but don’t go below them.

Mesia says any firm looking to set its own guidelines should begin with the nonvisible materials like studs and drywall. “[Creating] standard specifications [for those materials] is the easiest first step for a firm to improve their product categories,” she says. One specific metric she encourages practitioners to explore is each material’s carbon footprint. “This is probably the biggest one where people didn’t know if they were looking at a good or a bad number—they didn’t have a benchmark,” she explains. “A data point like that saves them a lot of research and time.”

For their next release of standards (due to launch in January 2025), Gensler is seeking outside input. From now until the end of the year, GPS 2.0 is available on their site as a PDF for anyone to download, review—and join the conversation. “There is a comment link on our webpage. Anyone who has feedback and wants to provide it, we’re taking it,” says Briefel.

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Laura Fenton is a writer with a special interest in the intersection between homes and sustainability, and is the author of the Living Small newsletter and two interior design books, The Little Book of Living Small and The Bunk Bed Book. She has written about home and design for nearly 20 years, and her work has appeared in many outlets, including Better Homes & Gardens, House Beautiful, Real Simple, and The Washington Post, as well as online publications and regional design magazines.